Growing up STINKS!

Who'da thunk it? Five years ago if you had told me that the prospect of a summer without a visit from my stepdaughter would have me in tears I would have laughed in your face. Loudly.

For most of my marriage to her father she was a casualty of our nasty little war. He paraded her out, showered her with gifts and spent ungodly amounts of money on activities to keep her happy. I resented her... dear God how I resented her.

He treated our children and I like we were wastes of space and air while she was the pampered princess. I thought all manner of nasty, horrible things about her. I think I may have even hated her. I can only pray that it didn't show too much.

Lord, she was just a little girl and he played us against each other - and I let him. She's such a sweet thing... she deserved better.

I never once, while wrapped up in my selfishness, considered her - how she felt, what she thought, how it all effected her.

When we still lived in MD we saw her one night every other weekend. Then when we moved to OR we saw her for a few short weeks over the summer. We were not much more than strangers... and she was helpless. 3,000 miles away from the people who could protect her. Lord knows I couldn't. And didn't.

We had no land line so she couldn't call home without borrowing a cellphone. She didn't know anyone. She had to have been miserable and so so lonely. And scared. My house was living hell for me and my children, and it was all we knew. What must it have been like for her? When she came from a home where they don't even yell at each other?

When my husband was (literally) kicking me across the room because his daughter "deserved better than the trash heap of a house I managed to keep" I never once stopped resenting her long enough to consider how she must have felt to know her stepmom was being hit because she was there.

How must she have felt to know she was the only one who wasn't getting hit or yelled at and know I practically hated her for it? Did she ever wonder if someday he'd stop treating her like a princess and target her too?

Three years ago, come July, something changed. Darned if I didn't fall madly in love with the smart, witty, wonderful young woman she had become. Darned if I didn't decide she was one of my own who needed protecting instead of being one of the enemy.

And darn it all if she didn't love me back. Loved me and forgave me and swore I would always be family, even after I left her dad. She still came and stayed with me, even when my marriage was over.

Tell me, what did I do to deserve that?

And now, this lovely young lady is practically an adult. She has demands on her time and plans for her summer that leave very little room for a former stepmom and half-siblings who are 3,000 miles away. She's trying so hard. I can tell she's torn. She's trying to squeeze us in, and it may cost her all manner of fun with her friends.

So I did something that just about killed me. I told her not to try too hard. I told her we'd miss her like crazy but its ok if she can't make it.

IT ISN'T OK!

Its probably the last chance we'd have before college and life takes her on a path so far removed from a frumpy former stepmom and four kids on the West Coast. The last summer before she's thinking about dorm rooms and jobs and the big, wide-open future.

And I gave her permission not to come. Why did I do that?? I want a piece of this last bit of her childhood. I know I don't have a right to it, don't really deserve it, but Lord do I want it.